The government’s shadow minister for housing Tony Lloyd claimed not enough ambulances were getting to seriously ill people on time.

In response, NWAS said he was referring to ‘out-of-date’ targets that were not comparable to new measures brought in back in August.

A spokeswoman said: “We are not only monitored by the timeliness of our response, but also a number of clinical outcomes that check the level of care that we give to our patients and for those who perform well.

“It measures our care for patients who have suffered a stroke, heart attack, or cardiac arrest.

“We acknowledge that our performance against the national standards has not been as good as we would like but we would like to assure the public that much is being done to improve this."

In a report last month, Mr Cartwright said the service continued to 'experience significant challenges' around ambulance response times and 999 call pick-up times.

He said NWAS had improved its attendance times for the most seriously ill patients in February and said that, 'although there is some way to go, this improvement is encouraging'.

But he said the service continued to see 'high demand' and, towards the end of the month, 'increasing NHS system pressures' led to delays in handing patients over to staff at A&E departments.

Last year, new standards were brought in, with paramedics expected to reach the most serious emergency cases within an average time of seven minutes, and within 15 minutes nine in 10 times.